Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 17th Nov 2006 13:23 UTC, submitted by Tanked
In comments confirming the open-source community's suspicions, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer Thursday declared his belief that the Linux operating system infringes on Microsoft's intellectual property. In a question-and-answer session after his keynote speech at the Professional Association for SQL Server conference in Seattle, Ballmer said Microsoft was motivated to sign a deal with SUSE Linux distributor Novell earlier this month because Linux "uses our intellectual property" and Microsoft wanted to "get the appropriate economic return for our shareholders from our innovation."
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Member since:
2006-02-17
Well, yeah, the Linux implementations of NTFS and FAT/VFAT support are sort of reverse-engineered. In Linux, of course, the implementation is far different, so it's the physical format of the data on disk that's the only part that is the same.
MS may assert that even though the physical format of data on the disk is not claimed explicitly in their patents, it is implied. That is not likely to stick. Further their patents quite explicitly indicate that they are patenting a method for implementing FOR WINDOWS functionality that was already prevalent elsewhere (long filenames, for instance). Linux isn't attempting to provide this functionality to Windows.